Æbleskiver

Æbleskiver means apple slices, but there’s no apple and they are not sliced.

For my next recipe I have chosen æbleskiver. Æbleskiver means ‘apple slices’, which is weird because it doesn’t have any apples in it and it’s not sliced.

Æbleskiver are actually round pancakes which you dip in jam and then icing sugar, and they are really yummy. In Denmark, they are mostly eaten in the winter.

When I lived in Denmark one of my favourite treats was to go for a day out to Tivoli — a big theme park in the middle of Copenhagen. It is open all summer and then again in the winter for Halloween and Christmas. Winter in Copenhagen is very cold so to help people keep warm there are lots of kiosks selling mulled wine, hot chocolate, and æbleskiver.

Now I’ve probably made you quite hungry so here’s how to make them.

Before we start I should tell you one thing. To make this recipe properly you will need a special æbleskiver pan, which is also the same as a Dutch pancake pan.

At first, I tried to make the æbleskiver without the special pan by baking them in the oven in a muffin tray, but it was a bit of a disaster, look over my shoulder in this photograph.

My oven-baked æbleskiver were an absolute disaster. So I started all over again with a new recipe.

Luckily æbleskiver pans are quite easy to find, even in Australia.

Here is what you will need for the recipe.

2 eggs

310 grams of self-raising flour

1 tablespoon of white sugar

½ teaspoon of baking soda

½ teaspoon of salt

¼ teaspoon of cardamom

50 grams of butter

475 ml buttermilk

Some cooking oil or butter for frying

Plus some nice jam and some icing sugar

Here is what you do:

Separate the egg yolks from the egg whites. My mum helped me with this as it is a bit hard but she has a trick where she keeps tipping the egg yolk from one half of the cracked egg shell into the other and the egg white falls into a bowl underneath.

Beat the egg whites until they are stiff.

Melt the butter in a microwave oven.

Separately, mix together the flour, salt, cardamom, baking soda, sugar, egg yolks, butter and buttermilk until the mixture is smooth.

Now fold the egg whites into the mixture.

Put a little bit of butter or cooking oil into each hole in the æbleskiver pan and put it on the cooker until the butter or oil is hot.

Fill each hole to ¾ with the æbleskiver mixture. Now it gets tricky.

Once the æbleskiver start to cook, you need to keep turning them so they form a ball and are evenly cooked all over, but not burnt. We used a long pointed stick for this, but it takes a bit of practice.

Now comes the tasty bit. Serve them up with a big dollop of jam – we got some lovely organic raspberry and blueberry jam from IKEA – and with a little pile of icing sugar.

The best way to eat æbleskiver is with your fingers, but before you pick them up make sure they are not too hot.

If you are a grown up, you might want to have a glass of mulled wine too, or if you are a kid, why not have a mug of hot chocolate instead.

If you find you have cooked too many æbleskiver and you are really full, you can freeze the ones you can’t eat and microwave them another day.

I hope you enjoy them as much as me. Maybe one day you will also visit Tivoli and actually eat them in Copenhagen!

Thanks for your second recipe. I had a Danish great grandfather. His last name was Grøn, but he changed it to Green in Australia. I never met him but it makes me interested in Denmark and Danish things!

Cool! Later this week I’ll be posting a recipe for a dinner, so you could cook that, with æbleskiver for dessert, then pebernødder with your coffee. Then it would be like travelling to Denmark without leaving your house 🙂